If you work for Segantii Capital Management, the equities-focused Hong Kong hedge fund founded in 2007 by former Dresdner Kleinwort Benson trader Simon Sadler, you should at least be receiving a lot of headhunter calls.
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Following today’s news that Segantii is shutting down and returning money to investors, headhunters tell us they are “all over” its employees. Some of the best have already been poached by rivals. “People have been onto them for months,” says one headhunter in the space.
Segantii is based in Hong Kong. It had $4.8bn in assets under management in March 2024 and 151 employees globally, spread between offices in Hong Kong, London, New York and Dubai. Around half its employees are thought to have been in Hong Kong, however.
Recent exits from the fund include Varun Nayyar, an ex-Deutsche Bank rates trader who joined rival hedge fund, Millennium, this month after nearly five years at Segantii. Nayyar will be among friends: Ryan Cain joined Millennium from Segantii last October; Jeremy Ma joined from Segantii in November 2022.
Bobby Jain has also been availing itself of Segantii’s talent. – Stan Schpetner left after two years in March for Jain Global.
Even as it winds down and returns capital to investors, though, Segantii is still hiring. The fund’s own site is advertising nine jobs, including portfolio managers and business development analysts (effectively in-house headhunters) to grow the business.
The recent recruits include former Joon Ho Choi, a former senior portfolio manager at Millennium, who arrived in March, Matthew Jones, an ex-junior Goldman Sachs equity trader who arrived via ExodusPoint in April and Peter Holdway, a former Morgan Stanley trader who also arrived in April. Jones and Holdway are in London.
There is no indication that anyone mentioned in this article is implicated in the insider trading charge that prompted Segantii’s closure. However, some headhunters told us that the charge may lead rivals to hesitate when hiring Segantii’s people. Similar charges didn’t dissuade rival funds from hiring from Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital when it actually pleaded guilty to such charges in 2013.
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